Behold The Leaked TouchPad—HP's Response To The iPad

It's been partly hidden for months, hotly anticipated since HP bought Palm and ditched its plans for a Windows tablet, and now here it is via a seemingly completely unofficial leak: TouchPad, HP's response to the iPad.

Check out the video below, courtesy of SanDisk, who were happy to show HP's tablet device at the Computex show because they're manufacturer partners to HP, supplying storage for the device:

The only things we've seen of HP's TouchPad have been an official demo that didn't display much of how the tablet would really behave in real life, a glossy web page and a (slightly bizarre?) promise from an HP exec that it's going to be better than number one, i.e. the market-dominating iPad, perhaps being "number one plus."

But now we can see how HP has evolved Palm's innovative webOS, initially developed for the supposedly iPhone-defeating Palm Pre smartphone, into a tablet format. It's very slick.

It's also going to set off alarm bells among HP critics and Apple fans as being extraordinarily like the iPad in form and function, and how much like iOS webOS for tablets has become—right down to the look and feel of apps like email, scrolling menu performance, and even the color scheme for parts of the UI.